Conservative think tanks have played a central yet largely
unexamined role in the corporate battle against environmental policies and
reforms. Conservative think tanks are generally set up as
private, research and advocacy institutes, and are largely funded by foundations
and corporate money.Local examples include the Tasman Institute and the Centre for Independent
Studies that have been active in Australia and New Zealand (Kelsey 1995).

Think tanks have successfully placed neoliberal remedies to environmental
problems on the policy agenda. Neoliberal environmental policies focus on
deregulation and utilising private property rights and include policies such
as pollution charges and tradeable pollution rights. They have come to be
accepted by most of the major players in the policy arena, including the mainstream
environmental groups who have largely ceded the territory of environmental
policy to conservatives.

Sustainable development policies have been extensively studied from
the point of view of their effectiveness at achieving environmental protection
but the political basis of their formulation and adoption—the agenda
setting process—has been neglected. Think tanks, particularly US think
tanks, have played a key role in providing policy entrepreneurs to organise
advocacy coalitions, and promote neoliberal policies as solutions to environmental
problems.

Neoliberal environmental policies appeal to certain 'deep core' beliefs associated
with the need for reduced government intervention and an increased dependence
on the market. These core beliefs hold the advocacy coalition promoting neoliberal
policies together.[1] It was not till sustainable development reached the policy agenda, in a context
of broader neoliberal reform, that this advocacy coalition was able to expand
the interest in these proposed policies to other participants in the relevant
policy networks (Beder 1996).

Think tanks have proven to be more powerful policy entrepreneurs than
environmentalists because they have more direct access to decision-makers
(Beder 2000); they have the resources to devote to years of policy development
and promotion; and they have been more strategic in ensuring that environmental
problems are framed in terms that suit their choice of solutions.

Agenda setting is essentially an exercise in power and influence. Setting
the agenda involves not only getting issues onto an agenda but also being
able to determine the way those issues are defined and the solutions
that are considered to be suitable. Agenda setting theory generally requires
advocates to expand interest in a particular issue or policy (Cobb & Elder
1983, pp. 105-8). The role of environmental groups in this respect is more
evident than that of think tanks acting behind the scenes.

Whilst environmental groups effectively use the mass media and protest actions
to get environmental problems onto the public agenda, they are relatively
ineffective at shaping the policy agenda. More powerful policy entrepreneurs
and communities with more direct access to decision-makers can utilise
the momentum created by the environmentalist networks to give their own policy
changes impetus.

Cobb et. al. (1976) propose three
models of agenda building:

an outside-initiative model where citizens groups gain
broad public support and get an issue onto the formal agenda;[2]

a second model where the issues are initiatives of government
that need to be placed on the public agenda for successful implementation;
and

an inside-access model where the policy proposals come
from policy communities with easy access to government, with support from
particular interest groups but little public involvement.

Whilst environmentalists tend to utilise the first model, it is this third
model that the neoliberal policy entrepreneurs utilise, helped by their superior
access and insider networks.

To be effective, think tanks insert themselves into the
networks of people who are influential in particular areas of policy. This
is facilitated by the fact that many think tank personnel come from these
networks, having formerly been bureaucrats and politicians themselves. They
organise conferences, seminars and workshops, publish books, briefing papers,
journals and media releases for policy-makers, journalists and people able
to sway the policy makers. They seek to provide advice directly to government
officials and to government agencies and committees, through consultancies
or through testimony at hearings. Ultimately think tank employees become policy-makers
themselves, having established their credentials as a vital part of the relevant
policy/issue network.

Kingdon's notion of a 'policy window' is an important part of agenda setting
theory (1995). A policy window is when the opportunity arises to change policy
direction. Policy windows can be created by triggering or focussing events,
such as accidents and disasters, as well as by changes in government and shifts
in public opinion. The policy window that was most useful for neoliberal environmental
policies was created by the raising of environmental issues onto the policy
agenda by the media in the late 1980s combined with the publication and UN
approval in 1987 of the Brundtland Report, which put environmental policies
onto the policy agendas of many governments.

A 'policy window' offers opportunities to any group able to mobilise support
for a particular set of policies. In the case of sustainable development environmental
groups mobilised to influence the policy agenda as did a conservative coalition
of corporate and ideological players. The question that remains unanswered
however, is how did neoliberal policies come to triumph over other alternatives,
particularly those promoted in earlier times by environmentalists, such as
tougher legislation that reduced that power and autonomy of corporations?

McCombs & Shaw (1972) define a ‘primary’ level of agenda setting,
when issues reach the public or policy agenda, and a ‘secondary’ level of
agenda setting, which involves the assignment of attributes to issues that
reach the agenda. The way issues are framed and problems defined shapes the
understanding of what causes the problems and the relative merits of various
solutions. Primary agenda setting is about ‘what
to think about’ or salience whilst secondary agenda setting
has to do with ‘how to think about the issues’ or framing.

The way an issue is defined or framed will clearly influence how people assess
various solutions. The success of neoclassical economists in framing environmental
problems as a "failure of the market to properly value the environment"
(for example Pearce et al, 1989) led to neoliberal solutions dominating the
policy agenda. By allowing this redefinition of the environmental problem, environmentalists
and others not only forestall criticism of the market system but in fact implicitly
agree that an extension of markets is the only way to solve the problem.

The root of the environmental problem, however, is the priority
given to economic considerations over environmental considerations. Neoliberal
environmental policies ensure that priority is still given to economic goals
and they enable firms to make decisions that affect others on the basis of
their own economic interests. Even if those economic interests have been slightly
modified to give a small economic value to environmental impacts, the basic
paradigm remains unchanged: whenever big profits can be made environmental
considerations will be sidelined.

The environmental policies promoted by the conservative advocacy coalition
were in turn part of a wider package of neoliberal policies that was already
being implemented in Australia and New Zealand. This also provided a
context which favoured the adoption of neoliberal policies to deal with environmental
problems.

The market solutions being advocated by neoliberal think
tanks provide corporations and private firms with an alternative to restrictive
legislation and the rhetoric to make the argument against that legislation
in terms that are not obviously self-interested. While legislation is aimed
at directly changing the behaviour of polluters by outlawing or limiting certain
practices, market-based policies let the polluters decide whether to pollute
(and pay the cost) or not.

Far from being a neutral tool, the promotion of market-based
neoliberal environmental policies serve a political purpose in that they reinforce
the role of the ‘free market’ at a time when environmentalism most threatens
it and they head off more environmentally protective measures that might necessarily
restrict business activity.